[Kalimac]

Knight - that honestly hadn't occurred to me. Ugh. No time-travel back to the dinosaur era for me, thanks!

Voralphion - I agree that it would be possible at the outside to bring a bird that size down, but I really don't think that ordinary arrows would do it. Bard was very lucky to bring down Smaug - he shot him in the ONE place that could have even damaged him, and even then he had the assistance of his black homing arrow which had been in the family for generations. Also Smaug was much closer to the ground - it would have been hard for him to wreak fiery havoc and destruction from 5,000 feet in the air. As for how big he was - well, there's no way to know. But he could get out of the Lonely Mountain somehow, and the entrances, while large, probably weren't hangar-sized.

In the end it's sort of a moot point, because as everyone's been pointing out, it does seem unlikely that a bird could be the size of a jetliner and still get off the ground. OTOH, Shelob is also anatomically impossible - past a certain size (a much smaller one than she achieves), a spider's legs would simply not be able to support its own weight and would collapse. But that doesn't take away from her impressiveness any. [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img]